Schwarzwohnen: The spatial politics of squatting in East Berlin

East Berlin's squatter movement erupted across the city after the fall of the wall in 1989. But what role did housing activists in the 1980s play in shaping an alternative vision for the contemporary city?

In September 1988, an anonymous report appeared in the East
German underground magazine Umweltblätter
describing the plight of a group of squatters who had occupied 61
Lychenerstrasse in the Berlin district of Prenzlauer Berg. In the squatters own
words, they had “occupied the house in order to overcome the contradiction
between, on the one hand, the many vacant and decaying houses [in Berlin], and
on the other, a growing number of people in search of housing”. As “squatters (Instandbesetzer),” they proclaimed, “we
will resist the further cultural and spiritual devastation of the country.”[i]

The Umweltblätter
represented one of the most important and widely distributed samizdat
publications in East Germany during the 1980s.[ii]
It was published by the Umwelt-Bibliothek, an
independent information centre that opened in the basement of the Zionskirche
meeting hall in Berlin in September 1986. The Umwelt-Bibliothek was founded by a number of prominent
environmental activists including Christian Halbrock, Carlo Jordan and Wolfgang
Rüddenklau and soon became a key site within a wider network of protest and
dissent. Umweltblätter was edited by
Rüddenklau and was the largest and longest running dissident publication in the
GDR (32 issues between 1986-1989, with a print run of 4000 per issue).[iii]
While the Umweltblätter and other samizdat
publications focused on issues relating to the peace and environmental movement
that had sprung up in East Germany in the late 1970s, a number of articles also
drew attention to the illegal
occupation of housing in cities such as Berlin.[iv]

But who were these squatters? What
were the central characteristics
of urban squatting in the GDR (goals, action repertoires, political
influences)? Why did some East German squatters choose to describe themselves
as Instandbesetzer, a term commonly used
by Western activists?[v] And,
finally, in what way did these practices challenge the dominant model of
ownership and control in the GDR and promote an alternative vision of the city?

To begin to answer these questions demands a re-thinking of
the recent history of radical housing politics in Berlin. The development of
the squatter movement in Berlin (Hausbesetzerbewegung)
is now well known. While early experiments in alternative forms of communal
living in West Berlin can be traced back to the extra-parliamentary opposition of
the late 1960s and early 1970s, it is widely argued that there were two major
waves of squatting in Berlin. The first was characterized by the development of an alternative scene in
West Berlin which, beginning
in the late 1970s, responded to a deepening housing crisis by occupying
apartments, the overwhelming majority of which were located in the districts of
Kreuzberg and Schöneberg. The second was concentrated in the former East of the
city as activists took advantage of the political power vacuum that accompanied
the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. At
one point in 1990, over 130 buildings were occupied in various districts in the
eastern half of the city. The little work that has been done on squatting in
East Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s points, in this context, to an equally
significant chapter in a wider history of reclamation and resistance, precarity
and protest.

As historians of the GDR remind us, housing was a “truly
political matter.”[vi]
This is hardly surprising perhaps given the parlous state of housing in the
wake of the Second World War. In the 1950s, central heating was available in
less than 3% of residences. Only 30% of residences had a toilet and 22% a bath.[vii]
In response, housing policy became a key site of statist intervention as East
German authorities claimed principle responsibility for the construction,
maintenance and allocation of housing. A key institution was the Communal
Housing Association (Kommunalen
Wohnungsverwaltung or KWV) which
administered 72% of Berlin’s properties. A further 15% belonged to housing
cooperatives and the remaining 13% were owned privately and under the control
of state-allocated trustees.[viii]
Rents were capped at 1930s levels and citizens were legally required to obtain
permission from local housing authorities before they could take up residence
at a given address.[ix]

By the early 1970s, official policy had only exacerbated the
dereliction of older housing stock across East Germany and, despite an
ambitious building programme undertaken during the Honecker era, an acute
shortage of housing persisted. There were still 600,000 people on official
housing waiting lists in the early 1970s with waiting times averaging between
6-8 years.[x]
The cost of demolition and construction could not, in turn, be met by the state
and as a result, thousands of properties fell into ruin and remained empty. As
a secret report commissioned by the SED (Sozialistische
Einheitspartei Deutschlands or the Socialist Unity Party of Germany) in
1985 noted, there were over 235,000 empty properties across the GDR with
particular concentrations in major cities such as Berlin, Dresden and Leipzig.[xi]

It is against a backdrop of persistent housing scarcity,
that many citizens - often young but not
exclusively so - chose to occupy properties illegally. What Udo Grashoff has
recently described as “Schwarzwohnen”
(“Illegal living”) can be traced back to the occupation of a small apartment in
1967 in the East German city of Halle.[xii]
As Grashoff argues in the only existing study of squatting in East Germany, Schwarzwohnen was not a marginal
phenomenon but involved thousands of citizens in the 1970s and 1980s. A 1983
report, for example, put the number of people illegally occupying buildings in
the Berlin district of Prenzlauer Berg at 800. By 1987, the number had risen to
almost 1300.[xiii]
While many squatters believed that they simply needed to pay rent to formalize
their status, squatting remained illegal in the GDR. State officials were reluctant,
however, to carry out evictions as squatters often took pressure off growing
waiting lists and, in many cases, returned dilapidated housing stock into use.
As the right to housing was enshrined within the GDR’s 1949 constitution,
authorities also tended to avoid forced evictions as they would otherwise be
legally required to provide alternative housing for squatters.

The history of illegal occupation thus points, as Grashoff
suggests, to the complex ways in which in an alternative right to housing was articulated in the GDR. If some
squatters, including the activists living in Lychenerstrasse 61, borrowed and
re-developed, in part, an action repertoire that has its origins in the West,
other former squatters spoke of a uniquely East German phenomenon. “Schwarzwohnen” had, so they believed,
far more to do with a desire to take
control of their own lives and respond to basic housing needs.

For
some, therefore, squatting formed part of a wider
network of protest and resistance. As Wolfgang Rüddenklau, a former occupant of
a squatted house in Prenzlauer Berg at number 7 Fehrbelliner Strasse
explained: “The islands of occupied flats and houses […] grew together to form
a alternative social structure. They affirmed a self-determined lifestyle and
developed a common culture.”[xiv]
Others detected a more modest challenge to the state and a concomitant impulse
to invest the home with a range of meanings that did not necessarily chime with
official imperatives. If anything, existing evidence points to a spectrum of alternative
practices and tactics that, on the one hand, speak to the importance of housing
and the city for the development of oppositional cultures in the GDR and
that, on the other hand, anticipate the new wave of squatting that erupted in
the winter of 1989.

In
the end, as scholars turn their attention to the struggles of East German
squatters, the challenge must remain one of commitment to the study of what
squatters actually said and did. It is, after all,
out of a radical attentiveness to the various histories of urban squatting that
we might still come to know and perhaps live the city differently. And in the
case of contemporary Berlin, a stronger awareness of these histories might
still point us to an alternative beyond a city increasingly shaped by the
logics of profiteering and privatization, displacement and dispossession.

[ii]
Samizdat is the Russian word for self-publishing and came to be used by
dissident circles in the GDR (Samisdat)
to describe the production and distribution of subversive texts.

[iii] As the
Umwelt-Bibliothek was officially part
of the Zionskirche parish, it was legally protected by the state-church compact
which covered the church’s internal publications. Samizdat publications that
were produced under the auspices of various parishes were marked for “internal
church use only” (“Innerkirche
Information”). See Andreas Glaesser, Political
Epistemics: The Secret Police, The Opposition and the End of East German
Socialism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010) p. 449-450.

[iv] RHG,
“Lychener Strasse 61 in Berlin-Prenzelberg am Ende?” Umweltblätter, Nr. 10 (1988), pp. 2-3; “Durchsuchung.” Grenzfall, Nr. 14 (1987), p. 2. Umweltblätter was replaced by the
journal Telegraph which ran articles
in 1995 on the history of squatting in the East Berlin.

[v]Instandbesetzer is a term adopted by
squatters in Berlin and elsewhere in Germany. It is a combination of the German
for maintenance (Instandsetzung) and
squatting (Besetzung).

[xii] The
term “schwarzwohnen” offers up no
easy equivalent in English. “Schwarz”
is the German word for black and the well-known term “schwarzfahren” refers to the practice of fare dodging on public
transit. In this context, the choice of the term “schwarzwohnen” highlights perhaps the desire of citizens in the GDR
to eschew the complicated mechanisms of official housing allocation. The term “stilles besetzen” (covert squatting) was
also used in the GDR. See Mitchell, “Socialism’s Contest Urban Space,” p. 6.

Alex Vasudevanis
a lecturer in cultural and historical geography at the University of
Nottingham. His current research focuses on radical politics in Germany
and the wider geographies of neo-liberal globalisation. He is
currently working on a book for the RGS-IBG book series on the history
of squatting in Berlin.

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